Except for my impatience, today was a good day. I accomplished a lot, getting entirely prepared for the summer session, nearly two weeks before it starts. I also prepared all of the material necessary to revamp a course in the fall. I will work some more tomorrow morning, take care of some shopping, attend the graduation ceremony tomorrow night, and meet my son back at the house for a video and our special popcorn recipe. He is going to stay over and we will go to a movie on Wednesday.

Then, I’ll be faced with more space and whatever that brings me.

I keep thinking that this odyssey will find its own end, but it doesn’t seem to have happened as of yet. And I realize it could just drag on with me writing like this, no resolution about the manner of my mother’s passing, no woman in sight, no shift in job, money, or home–in short, no renewal, though that is the title of this work and my hope for a new creation. That would be the pits, no renewal, just some sort of journalistic/philosophical hamster wheel. If this is a bad read, one can imagine it as a way of life. I know that it took time for me to come to this stage, but I’m not at all happy about it. If I take that much time to create a new and more vibrant pattern, I’d have to live to be about 110.

Once upon a time (this is how bad this is getting), I deliberately set out to do a recapitulation. I dutifully searched out an appropriate spot where I knew I would not be disturbed and I set about cleaning up the area. I wanted the spot to become familiar with me and vice versa. I worked diligently at it for about two weeks before I was satisfied. Then I picked a day where I would be free to focus on myself, my past, and my path. When the day arrived, I went to the spot and settled in, fully prepared with what I knew would last all day and very probably over night and into the next day. I was ready, I was prepared, I was centered, and I was eager to face myself, my actions, and whatever it would take to right the ship of me. I was prepared to spend days if I had to, such was the depth of my intent.

And so I sat. I wandered around the perimeter of my spot. I sat. I reviewed. I wandered. I sat. I mused. I fiddled. I waited. Nothing, not a thing. I probed my past, my actions. Nothing. Done. I wondered about my path. Nothing. Finally, a goodly number of hours into it, but far less than I ever imagined, it came to me that I had already done what I intended to do simply by getting ready for it, preparing the spot, and being willing to be open to whatever came. I was just not expecting it to have been so already done that I was left with nothing.

Sometimes we do not wait for stimuli, we engage in responses to generate it. In this case, waiting was just that, waiting. It occurred to me that I should leave and go do something else–that would be where I would find something relevant, not just sitting there.

So, I gathered my stuff, shook my head at the wonder of it, and left the spot that I had sought for awhile, that I had worked at so impeccably, and simply left and went into the afternoon. I got into my car and drove around and wound up having some extraordinary encounters with people in what would normally have been very ordinary circumstances. The only reason they were not ordinary encounters was because I was paying attention to something other than me.

The result of my attending to what was going on around me was that the nature of relationships changed. I was not after anything, I wasn’t in it for me, I was just paying attention. I noticed that people were not used to that, and they responded much more openly. The end result was that I had genuinely related to those I ran into, and they, noticing that there were no attachments in my actions, were free to respond. It was an interesting lesson, and like many lessons, it was not something that was unfamiliar, but it was something that I then understood on a deeper level.

Somehow, I’m guessing the lesson is that I should not be spending all my time sitting and wandering and musing and fiddling within my own perimeters. This weekend, out of town, changed things a bit because I simply got out into the mix and I was not carrying my wants or my loneliness or my history.

Sometimes it is pretty hard to be dumb, especially when one is just smart enough to catch a brief glimpse of that idiocy. That’s why humor is important–who better to laugh at than our own machinations? It sure provides a rich enough vein to mine. We might be short in a lot of areas, but we are wealthy beyond our wildest dreams when it comes to finding things to laugh about.